Maintaining High Availability & Performance in a Virtualized Environment

National Systems Center (NSC) has been providing technology solutions to the food service industry since 1973. The company currently hosts the QuikOrder online ordering website which provides restaurants with a state-of-the-art system for receiving and fulfilling customer orders. NSC services a number of restaurant groups, including one of the United States’ largest pizza chains.

NSC’s database, web and application servers are virtualized and distributed across multiple datacenters for performance and reliability considerations. They use both direct attached and SAN storage. NSC noticed that during busy periods there was an increase in demand for memory and performance declined. Upon investigation they realized this was attributable to free space fragmentation on their virtual disks.

NSC experienced situations where severe disk fragmentation caused heavily loaded systems to become so far behind in processing the disk queue that they were rendered unusable. In addition to the journal and log file fragmentation, NSC also noticed that their databases became logically fragmented when they could not grow contiguously. This combination led NSC to seek a solution that would help it maintain its performance objectives.

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Brandon Smith, IT Manager at NSC, noted “PerfectDisk vSphere can’t be beat for reliability, speed and effectiveness.” If you are having I/O contention issues, Smith recommends initially defragmenting the VMDKs on a schedule to get things cleaned up initially and then letting PerfectDisk vSphere run automatically in the background when resources are available to maintain the disks.

As for benefits, Smith sees PerfectDisk vSphere as a very cost-effective and low maintenance utility:

“We spend just a few hundred dollars per host to get maximum performance from $10,000+ servers; that’s a remarkable return on investment. PerfectDisk vSphere gave us more of what we needed and at a lower cost than any other available solution.”

PerfectDisk vSphere helps NSC get the most from its virtualization investment at a fraction of the cost of rebuilding the disks manually or adding more hardware. And this allows businesses like one of the United States’ largest pizza chains ensure you get your order on time.